Syria Faces Many Fights, But Few Signs of Resolution

With Focus on Aleppo, Other Conflicts Don't Look Much Better

Aleppo may get the lion’s share of the coverage in Syria’s Civil War recently, but the presentation of the conflict by both sides (ironically as they have been for years) as the decisive battle for Syria, the reality is that Syria has no shortage of different  conflicts, with myriad different factions fighting largely independent wars.

Five years ago, Syria may have been a loose collection of rebels against a government, but today it’s common for two rebel factions to end up fighting one another, and there are several wholly distinct battles across the country, from the US-backed rebels at the Tanf border crossing to the fight between Nusra and the Syrian military over Idlib and Latakia Province.

Even sites like the Yarmouk refugee camp in Damascus regularly sees open combat, sometimes involving a governemnt force, sometimes just a pair of rebel groups. Eastern Ghouta, a suburb of Damascus, also has multiple ongoing fights, with internal disquiet among different rebel groups, and the Syrian military pushing in and taking some of the towns in the meantime.

None of these different fights has anything resembling a resolution on the horizon, nor indeed is it likely that a surprise resolution of one or two conflicts would actually mean much anywhere else in Syria, as the country stares down the reality of an increasingly less stable civil war, with ever more participants, that there is no end in sight.

Author: Jason Ditz

Jason Ditz is Senior Editor for Antiwar.com. He has 20 years of experience in foreign policy research and his work has appeared in The American Conservative, Responsible Statecraft, Forbes, Toronto Star, Minneapolis Star-Tribune, Providence Journal, Washington Times, and the Detroit Free Press.